


M.A.C.H.I.N.E.A.

by iimpavid, It_MightBe_Love



Series: original works, collected [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Canon Lesbian Relationship, F/F, Lesbian Character, Multiverse, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Science Fiction, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 09:26:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14829692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/It_MightBe_Love/pseuds/It_MightBe_Love
Summary: M.A.C.H.I.N.E.A. (Multiversal Administrative Council Helping Inferiors Navigate Empyrean Actualization) employs only the rarest of statistical occurrences: Singularities. Those (un)lucky individuals who are the only instance of themselves in the entirety of the multiverse. Their mission: to stop universes from eating themselves or each other by existing between the laws of spacetime.Cecily (codename: White Rabbit) is less concerned with the empyrean consequences of her new job and more worried about getting a human named Janine Fairweather to marry her someday.





	M.A.C.H.I.N.E.A.

**Author's Note:**

> Not to be confused with _deus ex machina_.

The first day of training for M.A.C.H.I.N.E.A. sees Cecily screwing up big time.

Shifting through slipstreams of multiversal Earths because rural Connecticut was, in fact, the worst possible place she could have picked for her first trip through a tear in reality. Most universes intersected there, a sort of liminal rest stop built up around a farmhouse older than dirt.

This is how she sees the woman who she knows will someday be her wife. Not that she can see the future. Cecily can’t see through time, no one can, that would be preposterous-- but she knows fate when she falls face first onto its striped living room rug. Her wife-to-be isn't home at the time but there's a portrait of her graduation (Cecily remembers hearing about this human education ritual, her multiverse cultural training coming in handy just the once) and the people who must be her parents bearing a sign that reads "PROUD OF U JANINE" in handwritten, colorful bubble letters.

 _Janine_. Her name is Janine.

* * *

 

Learning to coast through the möbius spiral of the multiverse takes some doing. She stumbles through Janine’s farmhouse through every stage of its renovations.

Sometimes this happens on purpose but most of the time by complete mistake. The farm is a crossroads of the multiverse and more than one rookie mission leaves her bleeding or broken and she finds herself stopping there. It’s the best rest stop she’s found. The bathrooms are immaculate. The first aid kit is always fully stocked with IV fluids and suture kits. The coffee table’s selection of novels is always rotating— except for _Alice in Wonderland_.

Janine keeps it on top of the glass between her succulents as a kind of running joke.

It’s 100% the reasoning behind Cecily’s choice of “White Rabbit” for her codename. She tells anybody who’ll listen, “It was my wife’s idea.”

She can't get herself to stop talking about Janine. Her coworkers might be sick of it but Cecily can't pay enough attention to them to care.

Over mess hall meals, she gleefully asks, “Have I told you about Janine? She’s starting an equine therapy service out of her dead aunt’s farmstead. Did you know that earth has horses? They’re like Kalgorian Shar’la’ruk but herbivorous and nice to pet. Anyway. She cut her hair last week and it looks great, my MNS caught some frames of it when I was stitching up that phaser wound in her bathroom…”

The talking isn't just limited _to_ work. She tells Janine about work whenever she can. 

Multiversal fraternization is “strictly prohibited” but sometimes her MNS (Multiversal Navigation system; "No, babe, it's better than GPS because it has everywhere.") is on the fritz.

It's on the fritz a lot. It can’t be helped in this line of work-- sometimes she gets shot at and the only thing to do is use the navigator on her wrist as a guard a la Earth's Wonder Woman. _Who doesn't want to be Wonder Woman?_

And when that happens? She gets to sit on the porch swing with Janine drinking weird Earth teas and getting to know her for a day or three instead of turning in for a debrief.

* * *

 

"Alright, so explain to me how the multiverse works."

Janine asks the big questions, even in the middle of stories about how Cecily got her latest phaser wound that left a stain on the hardwood flooring of the kitchen. This is why Cecily adores her. That doesn't mean she's at any less of a loss as her train of though stutters off its tracks and crashes into a ravine.

"Uh... What-- where do you want me to start?"

"Wherever the beginning is."

"But I can't move through time though--"

"No, I mean-- the base. The bottom of the pyramid."

“Right." Cecily nods like she understands even though the name of the Euclidean prism doesn't connect with the shape of a pyramid in her head for a solid minute after. She chews her lip. She's been in M.A.C.H.I.N.E.A. longer than she can remember and even explaining the basics means going back farther than she remembers.

Eventually, she sighs. "Right, okay. Here we go. So there are different universe levels. The Earths connected to each other are all Level Ones."

Here Janine nods and Cecily isn't relieved. This is only the beginning. "Level Twos are the ones that don’t share physical constants; those are harder to get to since y’know they don’t share your farmhouse, for example, or laws gravity." That earns her an eyebrow raise. Cecily is distracted for a moment by the glory of Janine's eyebrows, thick and dark and untamed. Her wife is too gorgeous. It's probably a crime somewhere to be that pretty.

When she recovers herself: "Level Threes suck, though, because they’re different bubbles of multiverses that are in dimensions outside of the third. If you wanna get space sick that’s the fastest way to do it, going to a Level Three. I mean usually we just go down in dimensions and being in the second and first blows chunks; I've heard about some agents who can travel in the fourth but like I said, time is above my paygrade."

She flaps a hand at Janine's frowning, "Anyway, the point is me and April-- that's my partner, April, did I tell you about her? She a human singularity, one of the only ones we've got-- we were at this Level Three ‘verse to find this dark matter refinery. It’s illegal in most bubbles to use a fuel that can literally break universes, I can’t imagine why you'd outlaw that but my job isn’t to ask questions—”

* * *

 

“If you think of it the right way everyone travels between universes all the time.”

This had become their version of the post-coital cigarette. Or mid-coital, depending on how exactly one decided to measure the duration.

“How d'you figure that?”

When Cecily tripped between universes to find Janine, they made whole day affairs of their lovemaking with giggling breaks for food or changes of scenery and begrudging pauses for the farmhouse’s chores. The chickens had to be fed no matter how preoccupied the mistress of the house might be. Janine had bought them robes, the excessively soft satin sort, in matching floral patterns. There wasn’t much point in getting dressed for chores and when the doorbell rang when their near-nudity made neighbors all the more quick to depart.

“It’s basic cartography. Think about it. A map can only be as detailed as the fineness of the tools you use. A person walking along the Connecticut River is most-likely putting their feet in places no one’s ever managed to exactly map, not even your Google-machine. Universes are the same way for you.”

“For all of us, you mean.”

“For _you_.” Cecily’s grin was a secret thing. She didn't keep many secrets.

Janine rolled onto her stomach, arranging a pillow under her chest so she could be propped with the minimal expense of effort. “So here’s a question, miss multiverse: are you and me always the same you and me?”

Cecily’s eyebrows raised.

“If there are infinite universes— and multiverses— just how many Cecilys am I dating?”

“Just the one.”

It was Janine’s turn to look quizzical.

“First: the mapping of the multiverses is only an inexact science for humanity; I will always come back to you, my same Janine, no matter how many versions of you I meet. And I’ve met a few but you're my favorite you. Second: one of the requisites for becoming a member of M.A.C.H.I.N.E.A. is singularity.”

A grief slanted across her eyes for just a moment and Janine remembered suddenly and poignantly that Cecily was not a human being, that she had a life far beyond what Janine knew.

“Singularity means that in every other universe I'm dead or I never existed in the first place. I’m the only me you’ll ever know anywhere in existence. You can rest assured, darling, you’re getting the same one. Besides if it weren’t the same me we’d have to negotiate boundaries every time we wanted to get it on and you’d’ve noticed _that_.”

* * *

 

They can’t get married in the legal sort of way. MACHINEA’s ordinances forbid it and there’s no way Cecily can be certain that setting foot off Fairweather Farm won’t break the crossroads in some bizarre and difficult way.

But she gets her armorer to forge them rings from the dust of the rings of Alturas-6 and that’s more than enough.

**Author's Note:**

> All rights reserved. Please let me know if you'd like to use this universe or its characters so we can talk.


End file.
